Alice
O. Howell
CONCERTO FOR AN UNKNOWN POET
She was an almost daughter of spring
and the leaves she wove
fell all through her
fifteen summers
always too soon
all her moves seemed
blighted
her bicycle had three flats:
a concerto of failure on concrete
she sang off-key at sixteen
wept over her mother's lonely coffee-grinds
clumped and decaffeinated
in the dirty white plastic pail
she was myopic, poetic, and
fat
and those last seasons were
a composition of pain
four movements in
Hoboken:
the opening motif to the left of a hangnail
a green rubber bookstrap
and no Wordsworth, yet
promising something
unique to her teacher
an andante of disordered gloom
the despair of a city in March
yet tintinnabulating snownotes
and percussions of a hope
the allegro brought another spring:
hayfever and itching eyes
she lay across her bed with
swollen sinuses and vulva
as generous as an
unpicked poppy
in some forgotten Elysian field
she slept in tears and innocence
the allegro ma non troppo
gave a crescendo of flutes
and jonquils
when she took her little
brother
to the pond in the park
watched
his plump black knees and listened to
his labored breathing
as he sailed his clothespin
boats
and her great heart
like a clumsy hill
burst with a tenderness no
music could bear!
Let any conductor anywhere
raise his baton this hour
and play for her a requiem
for that unseen beauty held
like a
brave green balloon against
an awkward and embarrassed sky!
even the paper
messed up the three-line obituary
that two cousins read
the day after the funeral
which neither would have
attended.
a.o.howell